This policy informs you how Latitude Law collect and manage data about you and why. As a firm we take privacy and data management seriously and if you have any concerns on how your data is managed please contact clivesey@latitudelaw.com

Latitude Law collects, uses and is responsible for certain categories of your personal information. When we do this we are the ‘controller’ of this information for the purposes of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other applicable data protection laws, including the Data Protection Act 2018.

We will process data given to us by our clients under their instruction in the course of providing services to them. When we do this, we are a data ‘processor’.

Legal reasons we collect and use your personal information

We must identify a legal basis for controlling and processing your data. We rely on a different legal basis depending on the data we are processing and the reason we are processing it. We rely on the following legal bases in these circumstances:

Consent

We use this legal basis in relation to marketing contact, and processing job applications.You always have the right to withdraw your consent at any time. If you wish to withdraw your consent then please contact us by email: clivesey@latitudelaw.com

• You can withdraw consent at any time
• In some cases you will give us consent to use your information in a certain way. If you have given us consent to use your data in a certain way, and we have no other legal basis for doing so, we will rely on your consent
• Consent will never be used as a lawful basis in relation to sensitive personal information

Legal obligations

Complying with our responsibilities to regulators and under applicable legislation. Complying with obligations to HMRC regarding records keeping of our financial activity, including information relating to transactions, billing and payments

• Defending a legal claim or upholding the rule of law
• Complying with our legal obligations as an employer

Performance of a legal contract

Delivering services to you under contract and keeping you updated with changes or information relating to those services or your case. Performance of any legal contract as a supplier or customer

• When we are processing information from you to arrange a contract between us, such as when you give us your details to enter into an agreement for services with us, and after that contract for work has been agreed between us
• We will process information that relates to the services we are providing you with, or receiving from you, that are bound by our engagement with you (legal contract)

Legitimate interest

We rely on legitimate interest to train our staff so that they can provide an exceptional service to all our clients. There may be scenarios relating to staff engagement with you which we review with them as part of training and development

• Our legitimate interest is to provide information to our clients and contacts that will support their use of our services and that could be of benefit to them
• We may rely on a legitimate interest to process information. When we do this we will have assessed our legitimate interest to consider the rights and freedoms of the data subject

Who will we share your personal information with?

We take client confidentiality very serious and will not share any information entered into any of our software or platforms unless required to do so by law. Other information we process we may share with:

• Professional advisers and consultants that help us to manage and achieve our objectives as a business, subject to there being an agreement confirming the way in which they will process your data after we have shared it;
• Training agencies that help us to develop our staff and services;
• Our accountants and solicitors that are engaged by us to provide services required by law, such as filing financial information with HMRC;
• We will use data processors, such as software providers, in the course of running the business including CRM providers, email communication platforms, social media platforms and help desk management systems;
• We will use 3rd party hosting providers to provision and host our software and platforms;
• Storage and archiving providers to ensure your information is protected securely and backed up.

How long will we save your personal data?

• Enquiry data – will be held for a maximum of 18 months if the enquiry doesn’t progress into a case the personal details supplied will be deleted.
• Client data and Correspondence data – we are required to keep our file of papers (except for any of your papers which you ask to be returned to you) for six years. We retain the any paper file for 12 months then it is securely destroyed. We keep an electronic scan of your file for a further 5 years. We keep this electronic file upon the understanding that we have your authority to destroy it six years after the date of the final bill we send you. We will not destroy the documents you ask us to deposit in safe custody.
• Job application data – to fulfil the range of requirements and obligations, we hold your information for 12 months after an unsuccessful application. During that time, we will also review your details against other roles that come up and contact you about any vacancies that we think might interest you, but if you’d prefer us not to do that please let us know by emailing: clivesey@latitudelaw.com. Meanwhile, if your application was successful, the details we hold about you on our recruitment system will form the basis of your future employee record.

Your rights

Under the GDPR, you have several important rights that you can exercise free of charge. In summary, these rights are:

• Transparency over how we use your personal data and fair processing of your information (which includes the right to be given the information in this notice);
• Access to your personal information and other supplementary information;
• Require us to correct any mistakes or complete missing information we hold on you;
• Require us to erase your personal information in certain circumstances;
• Receive a copy of the personal information you have provided to us or have this information be sent to a third party, this will be provided to you or the third party in a structured, commonly used and machine readable format;
• Object at any time to processing of your personal information for direct marketing;
• Object in certain other situations to the continued processing of your personal information;
• Restrict our processing of your personal information in certain circumstances;
• Request not to be subject to automated decision making which produce legal effects that concern you or affect you in a significantly similar way;If you want to exercise any of these rights, please contact us and let us know who you are and what right you want to exercise. We may need to ask for additional information regarding your identity, and we may also need some information from you on specific categories of data, types of processing activities or periods of processing activities that you wish to focus your request around.
• We will respond to you no later than one month from when we receive your request.
• If you want more information about your rights under the GDPR please see the Guidance from the Information Commissioners Office on Individual’s rights under the GDPR.

How to make a complaint

The General Data Protection Regulation gives you the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. The UK supervisory authority is the Information Commissioner’s Office who can be contacted at https://ico.org.uk/concerns/.

If you are a client and we have made a contract with you by electronic means (website, email, etc.) you may be entitled to use an EU online dispute resolution service to assist with any contractual dispute you may have with us. This service may be found at http://ec.europa.eu/odr. Our email address is info@latitudelaw.com

Use of cookies

We want to make the use of our website easy, useful and reliable. To do this we sometimes place small amounts of information on your device. These include small files known as cookies. They cannot be used to identify you personally but they do make your experience as a visitor better.

Our site automatically deploys the following cookies on visitors’ computers on arrival at our website, provided cookies are not blocked by the visitors’ browsers.

One of these cookies (CONCRETE5) allows us to maintain the user browsing experience and identify whether the user is logged into restricted areas. This is automatically deleted at the end of the browsing session.

The cookie (cookieNoticeDisplayed) is deployed once a visitor has been flagged about our use of cookies by the pop-out notice. It allows the banner to remain closed as you visit different pages on the site.

In addition the site deploys a number of third party generated cookies because of the integration of various third party applications on the site.

The cookies of which we are aware include:

From Google

PREF, utma, utmb, utmc, utmv, utmz, NID, docsperf, rememberme, qca, HSID, APISID, SID

These cookies provide us with information about the numbers of visitors and how they reached us, they also recognise location when used with Google maps and allow the pages to be liked using Google+.
We do not have control over the cookies deployed by Google we are forced to accept them to take advantages of the services this company provides which we believe to be of value to our visitors – their privacy policy which governs their use of cookies can be found here.

General cookie advice

You can restrict or block the cookies used by the website through your browser settings but this will impact your user experience. The Help function within your browser should tell you how.

Alternatively, you can visit www.aboutcookies.org which provides directions on how to block cookies on all major browsers. This site also explains how you can delete cookies that have already been stored on your computer as well as general information about cookies.

You should be aware though that restricting cookies may impact on the functionality of the websites you visit.